Find Focus Balancing a Busy Lifestyle

21st century life is pretty fast paced. We’re working longer and sleeping less. Social media has us constantly plugged in. This is a blessing and a curse. We’re bombarded with information from the moment we wake to the moment our heads hit the pillow.

With so much information around us and so much on our plates it can be hard to find focus. With this in mind I’m working alongside adidas on their Find Focus campaign to share a few tips and tricks that help me to find focus balancing a busy lifestyle.

Priorities

Knowing what matters most is key to organising your time. Write a list of your priorities and work accordingly.

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” -Socrates

Not only will this help you to put what matters to you the most first, it will also help to reduce your workload by highlighting the things that in retrospect aren’t so important.

Making Lists

There’s no denying the satisfaction of putting a thick black line through an item on your to-do list.

When you’re making a list don’t make anything too broad that you can’t cross it out. It’s better to have a long list that’s easy to cross through than a short list that’s too broad to work through in a day.

E.g. If you’re studying Maths, instead of ‘Revise’, be more specific with ‘Revise Vectors’ or ‘Revise Kinematics’

If you break a task down into small sections you’re much more likely to get it all done.

Little Wins

Little wins are so underrated. Getting your coffee for free at Pret. A room upgrade at a hotel. A passing compliment on your outfit from a stranger. A shared glance and smile across an otherwise miserable tube journey.

A lot of these little wins are luck. But they don’t have to be.

To make your day more productive and keep your positivity high, create your own little wins.

One way I like to do this is creating email tally’s. Every morning when I get to my desk the first thing I do is write two lines in my notebook. The date & ‘Email Tally’. Then I open up my emails and for every email I reply to a little stroke goes on the tally. When I get to 30 I take 10 minutes off.

I can’t begin to explain how much difference this little routine has made to my productivity.

It’s so motivating to see those strokes building up. It also means it’s completely on you. There’s no time period. You get your break as quickly or slowly as you’re willing to work. But if you’re like me, you’ll zoom through to get your 10 minutes asap. Win win.

Maximize Your Brain Productivity

I recently read a very interesting article on The 8-Hour Workday by Travis Bradberry.

“The eight-hour workday was created during the industrial revolution as an effort to cut down on the number of hours of manual labor that workers were forced to endure on the factory floor.. it possesses little relevance for us today.”

In a recent study conducted by the Draugiem Group they found that the length of the work day didn’t matter as much as the way the day was structured. Overall, the subjects who took regular short breaks were more productive than those who worked long hours.

“The brain naturally functions in spurts of high energy (roughly an hour) followed by spurts of low energy (15–20 minutes).”

After reading this article I put it to the test and the proof is in the pudding. I’ve found that I can concentrate on my work for roughly 50 minutes before starting to fidget and flick through my phone. So now when I’m at my laptop I take 50 minutes on, 15 minutes off. I can honestly say I’ve never been more productive.